Wikimedia Hackathon Experience

Image Credits - Robert Sim, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this year, I got the chance to attend my first Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and honestly, it was an experience I’ll never forget. I’ve been contributing to MediaWiki for a few years, but this was my first time meeting so many people from the Wikimedia world in person who all care deeply about open knowledge.

Tallinn itself was very beautiful. The old town looked postcard worthy with cobblestone streets, colourful buildings, and small old style cafes on every corner.

At the hackathon, I teamed up with Naresh Kumar Babu (TechieNK), and we worked on a project called Forage. The idea came from something very simple yet frustrating scenario. Editing structured data can sometimes feel overwhelming especially when you’re not sure what properties a page needs. So we built a user script that helps editors by showing expected properties based on a page’s “instance of” values and providing simple inputs to add or edit them.

It sounds easy now, but it wasn’t! We had to figure out how to pull the right data efficiently from Wikidata APIs and make the interface light, fast, and beginner-friendly. I learned a lot about Wikibase APIs, items, properties, claims and even Codex during those few days. And honestly, debugging JavaScript at night surrounded by other developers doing the same thing felt like the most natural thing in the world.

What stood out the most, though, was the receptive and encouraging nature of the fellow contributors. People would sometimes randomly drop by our table for an informal intro an we even received some suggestions for Forage which we hadn’t thought of. That open exchange of ideas is something truly special about Wikimedia. Everyone was there to help make things better not just for themselves, but for everyone in the world.

By the end of the event, Forage had grown from an idea into a working prototype. We pushed the code, did a quick demo, and even got some great feedback from other contributors post closing ceremony. But more than that, I walked away with a better understanding of how global and collaborative Wikimedia really is.

The Tallinn hackathon wasn’t just about building features. It was about learning, sharing, and realizing how far open collaboration can take us. I left with a notebook full of ideas and a head full of motivation to keep contributing.

If you ever get the chance to attend a Wikimedia Hackathon, take it. You’ll write code, break things, fix them again and you’ll meet some of the most brilliant, kind, and passionate people doing it.